Excluding search engines from affiliate links

Is it a good idea to block spiders from your affiliate links?

[Webdetective]

Should I be excluding the search engine spiders from all my affiliate links? Is this a good idea?

Should I use robots.txt to do this, or rel=nofollow in my affiliate links?

How about if I am using Redirects in .htaccess for all my affiliate links?
Ie: Redirect: /affiliatelink [affiliate...] company link....

[caveman]

People have been speculating about this for a long time. It would not be that hard for the SE's to hunt down aff code and de-emphasize pages carrying it, though it would be nearly impossible for them to find all the affiliate links, even those that are hard coded. And if they did this, they would need to define a percentage of links on any given page that are aff links, in order for a page to be de-emphasized, since many highly regarded auth sites carry some aff links.

That said, I see NO evidence currently that the SE's are hitting pages with mainly aff links on them, and I certainly see all sorts of examples of pages doing well with only aff links, hard coded, and plain as day.

Your call as to whether you want to guard against some possible future move by the SE's.

[Webdetective]

is de-emphasizing a page a kind of pagerank penality if the page contains excessive numbers of affiliate links? I usually have no more than 3 affiliate links on any one page, and all of those usually point to the same affilate link, and they are often a graphics button rather than a text link. I use these a lot. One particular affiliate program I belong to has a unique email capture code that works quite well and it doesn't even look like an affiliate link.

I hope search engines don't start discriminating against affiliate sites, since that's what I do for a living! Maybe they are mainly concerned about sites with excessive affiliate links plastered all over their pages, so just 1 or 2 per page should be no problem.

[caveman]

As I said, I see NO evidence currently that the SE's are hitting (i.e., de-emphasizing) pages with mainly aff links on them, and plenty of evidence that it does not hurt pages.